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This is just because I’ve had to deal with this multiple times, and I don’t want to forget.

OS X system integrated with Active Directory. The local admin account has no problems with Photoshop Elements 6. Non-admin users, like the AD accounts, find all the effects and filters are missing in Photoshop Elements 6.

The fix? Go to /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Photoshop Elements/6.0/Locale and change the permissions on the en_US folder to grant Read & Write permissions to everyone. Be sure to “Apply to enclosed items….”

When you do domain masquerading with sendmail, root is exempted from that by default. No big deal unless the host name of your system is not actually registered in DNS. I have a couple VMs that don’t need outside access or DNS registrations, but I’d like to receive their cron output cleanly.

This is a rather easy fix. In most sendmail .mc files you will find the DOMAIN(generic) statement. This refers to loading the generic.m4 file which includes a default statement to expose root without masquerading — EXPOSED_USER(`root’). Copy the generic.m4 to mycustom.m4 and remove the EXPOSED_USER line. Go to your .mc file and change the DOMAIN(generic) to DOMAIN(mycustom) and rebuild your sendmail.cf file.

Having recently acquired a Windows Vista PC for my own personal learning, I find that my Windows XP box is now irrelevant. It is a Dell Optiplex GX 280 (about 2 years old) that I would like to use as a MythTV back-end server and a VMWare Server host. To facilitate this, I picked up a 500GB Western Digital SATA drive. My intention is to install Kubuntu 7 Feisty Fawn, setup an LVM partition to carve out storage for video and VM images, install VMWare Server, and install MythTV.

The first step to getting the base OS up and running is to simply boot the Kubuntu live CD and then kick off the installer. I pretty much ran the defaults except for the disk setup. I setup a 50GB / partition with ext3 and a 2GB swap. I left the other ~450GB unpartitioned to hold an LVM volume later.

After the first reboot I noticed the video wasn’t optimum – 1024×768 from an ATI Radeon X300. I followed this wiki entry to get it running right.

Next on the docket would be LVM. First I need to install LVM:

sudo apt-get install lvm2

Also, I would like to have XFS support for use where I store video files.

Accept the defaults until the prompt to run vmware-config.pl to which you answer no

tar -xzf vmware-any-any-update109.tar.gz

cd vmware-any-any-update109

./runme.pl

Let it run the vmware-config.pl script

Accept the EULA and the defaults unless you want an override.

For example, this install I answered No to NAT networking as I just want a bridged connection.

I changed the directory for keeping virtual machine files from /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines to just /vm to use the LVM volume

Enter a serial number for VMWare Server

Verify the script successfully starts the services

Launch the VMWare Server Console via the vmware command

At this point, the system should be ready to create new virtual machines, but that’s a topic for another post.

Next, we will tackle installing MythTV on this system. I have previously setup a freestanding MythTV box to test it out. That system was an old spare PC when I started, but it did run successfully for a year and a half as my home DVR. Eventually it gave out, and now I would like to setup a replacement for it. This time I intend to setup this system as a MythTV backend system to do the recording and then setup another system as a front-end for viewing.

As a guide in this process I used this page from the Ubuntu Community Documentation.

This system has a Hauppauge PVR-250 tuner card in it, and it looks to be correctly loaded by default.

As the documentation page I’m referencing points out, we only need one package for this configuration — mythtv.

sudo su

apt-get install mythtv

vi /etc/mysql/my.cnf

comment out the bind-address 127.0.0.1 line

:wq

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

exit (to drop out of root context)

mythtv-setup

Click Yes to be added to the mythtv group

Enter password for sudo

Click Yes to restart your session

Login again

mythtv-setup

Click Yes

Enter password for sudo

Choose English

General

Set IP address of local system

Set directory to hold recordings to /video

Increase max simultaneous jobs to 2

Enable auto-commercial flagging jobs when the recording starts

Capture Cards

New capture card

Card type: MPEG-2 encoder card (for my PVR-250)

Video Sources

New video source

Source name: Bright House Cable

Enter username and password for zap2it labs account

Input Connections

Setup Tuner1 for CableTV

Channel Editor

No changes

Exit mythtv-setup

Click Yes to run mythfilldatabase

mythfrontend

That’s it. At this point, the system is up and running Kubuntu 7, VMWare Server, and MythTV. Stay tuned for more posts about putting this platform to use.

A common technique when building web applications is to hide menus based on the user logged in. While it is obscure, it certainly is not secure. Each script must have access control built in. I prefer to delineate roles and map users to them. When a page is requested by the web server, check the logged in user name against the map. Don’t forget about your include files. Scripts that are included by others should have access control as well.

Obscurity is actually a good thing; the less info an attacker has the better. It just can’t be considered security.

Evidently there is a difference in regards to certificates between IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.0. I have previously used madboa’s SSL HOWTO to generate, sign and export PEM certificates to the PFX format that IIS expects. However, today, I tried using the same procedure with an older Windows 2000/ IIS 5.0 server and repeatedly got the same “import password is incorrect or the certificate has expired” message.

After some searching and learning that few people have had success with IIS 5.0, I came across a post from dejavu.mu.nu detailing exactly how to create a certificate that would work with IIS 5.0.

Loving the fact that I can push something Open Source onto a Windows platform!